Saturday, January 30, 2016

I had a lot
to say about Jerry Coyne’s Faith versus
Fact in my First Things review of the book, but
much more could be said. The reason is
not that there is so much of interest in Coyne’s book, but rather because there
is so little. I was not being rhetorical
when I said in my review that it might be the worst book yet published in the
New Atheist genre. It really is that
awful, and goes wrong so thoroughly and so frequently that it would take a much
longer review than I had space for fully to catalog its foibles. An especially egregious example is Coyne’s
treatment of Alvin Plantinga’s “evolutionary
argument against naturalism” (or EAAN).

The Albertus
Magnus Center for Scholastic Studies will be holding its 2016 Summer
Program in Norcia, Italy from July 10-24.
The focus of the program will be St. Paul's Epistle to the Hebrews and
St. Thomas’s commentary on it.

The
Witherspoon Institute will be hosting the 11th annual
Thomistic Seminar in Princeton, NJ, on August 7-13, 2016, on the theme Aquinas and the Philosophy of Nature. The faculty will be John Haldane, Sarah
Broadie, Edward Feser, Robert Koons, and Candace Vogler.

Friday, January 15, 2016

Hope you
won’t mind submitting to one more post on Islam (the last for a while, I hope). What follows are some comments on some of the
discussion of Islam and its relationship to Christianity and to liberalism that
has been going on both in my own comboxes and in the rest of the blogosphere in
the weeks since I first posted on the subject.

Thursday, January 7, 2016

Note: What follows is pretty long,
especially if you think of it as a blog post.
So think of it instead as an article.
The topic does not, in any event, lend itself to brevity. Nor do I think it ideal to break up the flow
of the argument by dividing the piece into multiple posts. So here it is in one lump. It is something of a companion piece to my
recent post about whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God. Critics of that post will, I think, better
understand it in light of this one.

Sunday, January 3, 2016

In Western culture,
the dog is often described as “man’s best friend,” and in Western art, the dog
is often used as a symbol for
faithfulness. Suppose, then, that we
compare the Catholic faith to a healthy dog.
The analogy might be useful for understanding how other religions appear
from the point of view of traditional Catholic theology. Perhaps non-Catholics will not be amused by
the comparisons to follow. But dog
lovers may appreciate them.

About Me

I am a writer and philosopher living in Los Angeles. I teach philosophy at Pasadena City College. My primary academic research interests are in the philosophy of mind, moral and political philosophy, and philosophy of religion. I also write on politics, from a conservative point of view; and on religion, from a traditional Roman Catholic perspective.